Beat Sheet the Newsletter of the Colorado Spider Survey Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Zoology Department, 2001 Colorado Blvd., Denver, CO 80205
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Beat Sheet The Newsletter of the Colorado Spider Survey Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Zoology Department, 2001 Colorado Blvd., Denver, CO 80205 Number 32 September 2019 Table of Contents Arachnology Lab Updates .............................................................................................................. 1 Upcoming Events ............................................................................................................................ 2 Arachno-Links & Resources ........................................................................................................... 2 In Memoriam .................................................................................................................................. 3 Arachnids in the News .................................................................................................................... 3 Participant News ............................................................................................................................. 5 Arachnology Lab Updates The arachnology lab had a busy field season. As regular readers of the Beat Sheet know, Paula Cushing and her colleague Matt Graham (a professor at Eastern Connecticut State University) received a $1M National Science Foundation grant in 2018 to study camel spiders in the family Eremobatidae (see Beat Sheet #30). That funding allowed the DMNS lab to travel to nine states in northern Mexico during the summer of 2019 and allowed Matt Graham and his lab, along with DMNS Master of Science student, Ryan Jones, to travel throughout the Baja Peninsula in search of the elusive camel spiders. Paula and PhD student, Erika Garcia, joined their Mexican colleague, Edmundo Gonzalez-Santillan, and three of his undergraduate students on two expeditions throughout the northern states of Mexico. They drove several thousand miles, arriving at each locality late in the afternoon in time to set up pitfall trap arrays with lights hanging over the pitfalls to attract the camel spiders. As soon as darkness fell, the crew would set out wandering throughout the desert searching for camel spiders out hunting. During the course of the two expeditions, the teams collected over 200 camel spiders. Paula suspects that these specimens represent five to 10 species new to science. Erika Garcia, Edmundo Gonzalez-Santillan, Jair A jar of death – some of the solifuges collected Castillo, Diana Batista, and Paula in Mexico. at one site. 1 In between the field expeditions, Paula flew Edmundo’s three students, Diana Batista, Jair Castillo, and Oscar Mendoza to Denver where they received training on solifuge taxonomy from Paula’s research associate, Jack Brookhart, one of the foremost experts on this group of arachnids. Jack Brookhart imparting solifuge wisdom to Diana Batista, Jair Castillo, and Oscar Mendoza in the Ryan Jones and postdoc Carlos DMNS Arachnology lab. Santinbanez Lopez in the field in Baja. Paula, Erika, Ryan, and Jack are now busy sorting and identifying all the arachnids collected throughout Mexico. Upcoming Events September 30th through October 9th: Paula will be teaching Spider Biology at the museum. The class will be taught from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. on the following evenings: September 30th, October 2nd, October 7th, and October 9th. There will be a ½ day fieldtrip on Saturday, October 5th. The class costs $110 for Museum members and $140 for non-members. Go to https://www.dmns.org/visit/events-and-activities/spider- biology/ to register. Arachno-Links & Resources Great News! Thanks to the letter writing campaign by you arachnophiles, the publishing house of Rich Bradley’s fabulous field guide, Common Spiders of North America agreed to publish this beautifully illustrated guide as a much more affordable paper-back! Instead of $95, it can now be purchased for $30 - $35 from any major bookseller. This is the premier field guide to over 400 species of spiders found in North America. The following are some fun links to scientist interviews about their arachnology research or to interesting online arachnology-related videos: Interview with Alexis Dodson on Science Friday. Alexis studies ant mimicking spiders and how they avoid predation through their mimicry: https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/how-jumping- spiders-avoid-becoming-a-tasty-snack/ Various BBC clips about spiders, including pieces by David Attenborough: http://www.bbc.com/earth/tags/spider 2 A great lecture about love of spiders by our own arachnophile, Gini Philipp, who spoke at an “Ignite Boulder” event. You can hear her lecture at: https://www.facebook.com/igniteboulder/videos/478211969428981/ In February, Paula was interviewed by two CU-Boulder graduate students who publish their own science podcast called “Buffs Talk Science.” You can hear their interview with Paula at: https://buffstalkscience.com/2019/02/20/ In 2017, the Field Museum of Natural History’s own Curator of Curiosity, Emily Graslie, the host of the wonderful online series called “Brain Scoop” visited Denver and interviewed Paula about her research on camel spiders. In August of this year, Emily sent an email saying: “I wanted to write and let you know that the video we made with you back in 2017 has seen a recent surge in views. To date, it has more than 584,900 + views, with a watch time of 2.5 million minutes (!). Pretty good for something we did a few years ago! We don’t often see our past videos make such a strong comeback, but really, how could you not love camel spiders?! It’s the 5th most-watched video on our channel, ever.” If you haven’t seen this Brain Scoop episode, you can see it at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a9o6j0S570 The online SCAN Symbiota database that the DMNS Arachnology lab uses to publish its collections data has now entered 41,000 database records! Not bad for a collection that is only 21 years old. You can search the DMNS arachnology data at: https://scan-bugs.org/portal/ Another website that would be of interest to readers of this newsletter is the World Spider Catalog – a continually updated taxonomic catalog of all 48,000 + species of spiders on earth! Visit: https://wsc.nmbe.ch/ In Memoriam Barbara York Main, Australia’s spider woman, author, and poet died in May of this year. Barbara was an expert on trapdoor spiders (mygalomorphs) and published on the life history of the oldest known spider – a 43 year old trapdoor spider in the species Gaius villosus whose demise in 2016 made news headlines worldwide. In an obituary about Barbara, Ann Jones said, “She wrote about and fought for the environment at a time when both the environment and women were given no fighting chance.” In her long lifetime as an arachnologist, Barbara published over 90 scientific research papers and four books about the spiders of Australia, not retiring until 2017 when she was 88 years old. Her influence on the careers of Australian arachnologists and scientists throughout the world is immeasurable. Arachnids in the News Sticky flatworms kill armored harvestmen. In October 2018, Rodrigo Willemart and colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Zoology (London) documenting the effective defensive strategies employed by a harvestman (order Opiliones) Mischonyx cuspidatus, against the predatory flatworm, Cephaloflexa bergi. The authors demonstrated that, although the flatworm was a formidable predator against the harvestman, the arachnid could sometimes fend off the attack with its own spiny body and defensive secretions leading the authors to hypothesize that “different predators exert different selective pressures culminating in the array of defenses exhibited by the prey.” Shiny eyes in ancient spiders. In February 2019, paleoarachnologist, Paul Selden, and colleagues documented the first known incidence of a shiny tapetum in the eyes of an extinct spider family Lagonomegopidae from the Lower Cretaceous Jinju Formation in Korean shale (110 – 113 million years old). Many readers of this newsletter may know that one can find wolf spiders hunting at night by shining a flashlight down on the ground where the light reflects off a crystalline structure in the back of the eyes called a “tapetum” that maximizes the amount of light in the evening that hits the retina, allowing night active spiders to have pretty good night vision. Selden’s study demonstrated that this tapetum evolved a very long time ago indeed! 3 Horseshoe crabs are relatives of spiders. In a study published in March 2019, Jesús Ballesteros and Prashant Sharma used a genetic analysis to demonstrate that horseshoe crabs are in the class Arachnida. Horseshoe crabs have long been known to be chelicerates, broadly related to organisms in the class Arachnida. Ballesteros and Sharma’s study demonstrates that they are more closely related to other orders in the class Arachnida than previously thought. Giant sea spiders may be able to adapt to the warming ocean temperatures. In a study published in April 2019 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B by Caitlin Shishido and colleagues, they tested the resilience of giant sea spiders (chelicerates in the class Pycnogonida) that live in the Antarctic Ocean (and whose leg spans can be more than two feet) under extreme conditions. The scientists wanted to find if these weird arachnids could withstand the warming temperatures of the oceans. These aquatic chelicerates have no respiratory organs and pick up all the oxygen they need through pores in their exoskeletons. The giant sea spiders living in the sub-zero waters of the Antarctic have very porous exoskeletons